Society

Farewell Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids, a charity that describes itself as supporting ‘trans, non-binary and gender-variant children, young people and their families’.  Green resigned rather abruptly on Friday, and the statement from its chair was short and to the point. An interim CEO will be appointed in due course.   Mermaids has found itself under scrutiny after deciding to bring a case against the LGB Alliance, the only UK-based organisation that focuses exclusively on same-sex attracted people. Mermaids claims it was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband trans charities like itself. The outrageous claims and questions by Mermaids witnesses and counsel during the tribunal,

One of the pleasures of fiction, be it book or film, is that it can take us to actual places beyond our own national boundaries – and into other worlds which don’t exist. Think of fictional states from Narnia to (Graham) Greeneland – and Richard Curtis’ London, that parallel version of our capital seen in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, where no one has ever seen a machete and swearing is only ever done in a jolly way. When I asked on social media for suggestions as to what this world might be called, I was inundated with suggestions. Curtistan, Curtopia, Notting Shill, Notting Swill, Treacletown and

Protests seem to be breaking out in several major Chinese cities in what has been a week of horrors for China’s zero-Covid policy. Rare displays of public anger have risen to levels not seen since the Shanghai lockdown, and perhaps even since the death of the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang three years ago. Chinese social media lit up the night he died, and a similar level of frustration and pain is being shared online right now. The latest tragedy is the death of ten people after a fire broke out in their locked down high rise in Urumqi, the capital of the remote region of Xinjiang – leading to angry